Child Observation Report
The age between 9 and 11 are called the middle school years. A child develops in the following areas:
i. Physical Development
ii. Cognitive Development
iii. Emotional and Social development,
iv. Sensory and Motor development
I will discuss here all the four areas of development. I have considered a real child in my study and am highlighting the child development. The child went through a number of phases and changes. The child is now 11 ? years of age and all the development features were observed during his growth. Much of the information came from his parents, relatives and neighbours. The girl’s father was professional working in IT field in a MNC as a manager and mother was simply a homemaker. The child achieved milestones as defined in the Piaget theory of Child Development with respect to the four areas of development mentioned above.
Physical Development
As she grew from the age of 9 to 11, the body strength and hand dexterity was observed to be increasing. An improvement was seen in hands, legs and eye coordination. The girl can be termed as 1.5 -2 years ahead of opposite gender in physical maturity. She began to menstruate at the age of 9 ? years. The girl was seen to be developing strength and affection toward female gender. BMI was 16 at the age of 9 years, and 16.5 at the age of 11 years. She started extensively using her memory and sometimes played prank on her parents.
Cognitive Development
As per Piaget, this stage is known as Concrete operational stage (7-11 years). The girl child started getting closer to the teen years. It was observed that at age 10 she started becoming independent and started using freedom. She used to play on her own, study on her own; she started doing thing without being told to do those. At the age of 9, the girl started making choices such as involvement in certain sports, activities and hobbies. She started taking interest in collecting stamps and took it up as her hobby. She started playing hide and seek, snakes and ladder, especially team sports with other friend of same age in the locality after school hours.
The girl’s parents started allowing her to make some choices such as clothes selection, TV cartoon program selection, game selection, etc. She was now allowed to take part actively in family decision making such as vacation planning, weekend planning, etc. In school, she started believing in good friendship and use to talk to her friends over the phone. She started communicating with her friends in secret codes, made-up languages and passwords to feel closer to each other. She showed interest in reading fictional stories and watching detective programs over television. She started enjoying life and friends’ company. She started identifying difference between right and wrong, colors and fun or boring. She very often used “That’s not fair!” whenever her wish was turned down by her parents.
As per Piaget theory of cognitive development, the child gained little weight at the age of 9 years and could classify objects according to several features. At the age of 11 years, she could think logically about abstract propositions. She started looking at her future and educational career. (Teaching)
Emotional and Social development
The girl used to get hurt easily while playing. She was more prone to personal injury and had fears of injections. Once at the age of 10 she got severe injured and had to be taken to hospital for immediate cure. The girl started identifying and developed lot of patterns of emotions such as fear, anger, jealousy, curiosity, problems. Her parents started valuing her, spending time to talk and play with her which made her happy and have high self-esteem. The girl had positive self-esteem and got involved in school and community activities such as drama and races. The girl was very sensitive and used to cry when her father used to go abroad for business purpose for few weeks. She used to imitate actresses from the movie and started picking up words that peer used.
Use of language became more sophisticated. She started sharing her opinion with her parents. She began to learn new language but without understanding the meaning. She continued to master complex grammatical constructions. The girl could describe objects in details with ability to describe similarities and differences. She could write occasional short stories and letters, increasingly conversed and enjoyed conversation with family and friends. She used to look out for other girl of same age and used to love making friends. The girl was seen to have more complex friendship and peer relationships. She thought it was very important to have friends. She started believing in luck and every now & then started referring to luck in her speech.
Sensory and Motor Development
She refined the gross motor skills and fine motor skills which she learnt at the beginning of school age (6-8 years) like jumping, throwing, kicking into sports and learnt to dress self completely. She from the age of 9 to 11, mastered hand and eye coordination and started helping her mother in household works such as sweeping, mopping and dusting. She could now easily draw and paint anything. She even like playing piano and loved playing computer games.
School is an important factor
For this girl child, the school was much more than only academics. It is a place where she learnt to develop friendship, learnt that the real world is not like their family, and in time, come to value the feelings and effort of others. Responsive, caring teachers were a blessing and played an important part in development of this child. Children started making friends and valuing friendship. Children at this age are much focused and think about their future endeavours. Teachers provide patient guidance, assistance and understanding as the children learn to socialise, contribute immensely to help children learn important lessons on affection, emotions, sharing, forgiveness, and acceptance.
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